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BB Gun Shootings by Sniper Put Alphabet City on Edge

A mysterious sniper who fired a BB gun repeatedly and apparently at random from the high floors of a public housing complex in Alphabet City last week has left many in the neighborhood on edge.

The shots, aimed from a roof or high window of the Lillian Wald Houses on Avenue D over two days last week, injured several people and broke car windows, the police said. And even though an increased police presence appears to have halted the assaults, many people who live and work on Avenue D between Third and Fourth Streets, where the shootings happened, say they are nervous about standing in the open.

“Everybody here is scared now,” Primo Dlmn from Morocco said on Tuesday while selling Lemonhead candy and cigarettes at a bodega in the middle of the block. “I think he’s crazy,” said one customer standing outside who declined to give her name. “He could have hurt anybody.

“I’m as nervous as I can be, but I’ve got to go to the store,” she added. “Life goes on.”

On Friday morning, Edward Gilyard, 49, was standing outside the construction site where he works, across Avenue D from the Lillian Wald Houses, when he felt something hit his head. He reached up and found blood. Checking the wound in a mirror, he saw a small hole in the center of a swollen area. Doctors later removed two metal pellets that had lodged under his scalp.

“I think he was just shooting at random, at whomever he thought he could hit,” Mr. Gilyard said on Tuesday. “For what reason? Nobody knows.”

The assaults occurred on an avenue that has stood as an eastern buffer to the march of gentrification through Alphabet City, a section of the East Village.

To the west lies the ever-growing offering of bars and restaurants that have made the neighborhood a popular destination. On the other side laps the East River. In between, two public housing complexes that are home to 8,000 people line Avenue D from 12th Street to Houston Street.

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Local residents speculate the shooter — many call him “the BB gun sniper” — must have been a bored teenage boy because firing a BB gun is the kind of thing that bored teenage boys do. Beyond that, many stories are circulating.

Lester Jones, 15, lounging on the sidewalk with two friends, shared a handful of the tales they had heard over the past few days. Maybe a dozen people got hit, said one. No, it was only six or seven, corrected another. One person lost an eye (false). One guy was hit twice (true). One of them was a cop (false). “I was hearing a lot of different stories,” Lester said. “I don’t know what to believe.”

The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said during a news conference on Tuesday that there had been other BB gun shootings in the area. Last week, before the most recent spree, officers arrested three teenagers in the neighborhood and confiscated a BB gun, the police said. “We have additional officers assigned there,” Mr. Kelly said. The shootings were reported by The Daily News on Tuesday.

Still, some people who live and work in the area said they had changed their routines: going out of their way to avoid the area of the shootings, escorting their children to and from school or no longer spending time outside.

But plenty more seemed unfazed, sitting on stoops, gabbing on corners and going about their routines. “I knew about it, but I was born and raised around stuff like that, so I wasn’t nervous,” James Heckstall, a Postal Service employee, said while making his rounds. Nick DeLuca, 58, said he was worried that the shootings would overshadow the neighborhood’s improved safety during the two decades he had lived there.

“It used to be terrible around here, the Wild West,” he said. “Now you can at least walk around at night. The neighborhood is getting nicer and nicer. Then, every once in a while, something like this happens, and it makes us look bad.”

Christine Hauser contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on September 30, 2009, on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: BB Gun Shootings by Sniper Put Alphabet City on Edge. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe